Partition Heck

I was able to get my Debian install disk to recognize all 20G of my hard drive. To do that, first I had to download the PowerMax utility from Maxtor. This created a diskette from which I booted and then was able to run some diagnostics and do a low level format. After that, Debian saw the driave as 20G, not 2G. However, I set up my partition tables and – unlike RedHat or other Linuces – Debian forces you to format the partitions one at a time, not having a “format all these and get to installing” option that I could find. In formatting the very first partition I told it to check for bad blocks. Thus far, it’s been formatting and checking for 18 hours and is still just over 1/3 finished. I can tell when it is in an area of high bad block density because it goes veeeeerrrrrry slooooooowly. When it leaves, it zips along. I’m half thinking about aborting this install, throwing this drive away and picking up whatever cheap smallish ones they have at Microcenter. Life is short, time is scarce.